AUSTIN, Texas — Circuit of the Americas (COTA) boss Bobby Epstein said he would be “surprised and disappointed” if the circuit did not get a renewal to its U.S. Grand Prix deal, which is set to expire after this year’s event.
The U.S. Grand Prix appeared on the 2022 race calendar with an asterisk alongside it, subject to a new contract. F1 boss Stefano Domenicali is in the Austin paddock for this year’s race on Sunday (1:30 p.m. ET, ABC), and Epstein said he believes a new contract is a formality at this point.
COTA aims to release 2022 tickets in April, and Epstein said he is confident everything will be wrapped up by then.
“We’d like to finalise it before we go on sale, although we’ll put some [2022] tickets on sale this weekend,” Epstein told ESPN when asked about the negotiations.
“I think it’s gonna get done. I’m highly confident that we’ll get there. I’d be surprised and disappointed if we don’t and I think [Domenicali] would say the same thing.”
After cancelling the 2020 edition because of the pandemic, COTA is expecting a bumper crowd for this year’s event, which should exceed the previous race-day attendance record of 140,000. Epstein credits the enormously popular Netflix series “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” with the rise in interest.
“We were at a sellout point in 2019 but we added capacity since that point … let’s say the capacity we added is 35,000. I would suggest that a good portion of that came from the Netflix growth of interest because the series wasn’t racing here in 2020, so we didn’t have any races in our time zone, so how did fans become more engaged?
“It certainly wasn’t because they were turning on their TV in the middle of the afternoon and joining. Instead, they were in eveyone’s home every day and they were streaming the TV show.”
COTA has pulled out all the stops to make its comeback event memorable. Epstein admitted last…
Source : espn
